TRADITIONAL HAWAIIAN WEAPONS

so hello everyone once again uh i'm kaibila chrisman i'm going to talk today about hawaiian weapons um for those of you who speak a little hawaiian in hawaii and elsewhere uh validaho cottonwood cacao um we call her so let me go on now hawaii's used various things to make their weaponry some hardwoods that were available there in hawaii one or two maybe not available elsewhere also sharks teeth especially tiger sharks teeth sometimes stone weaponry the other video is on hawaiian stone work that tells how the stone was worked and how answers were used to shape the wood and rubbing stones and so on we'll make another video on tools and the use of the tools to make things like this so let's start in over here this is a real interesting one a nasty little weapon that was made with a cordage called olinar i've used a substitute cordage here and three pretty good sized tiger shark teeth so it's an eight ply braid and if you put that loop on your thumb like that and bring this cord around here and put this loop on your middle finger and then you bring this loop back around this is just an extra piece of cordage as a brace and tuck it under here you could get out of it pretty quick if you needed to but see you've got complete use of your hands you can fight with your hands and you tighten your fist you've got a vicious slashing weapon so that wasn't very common we know they did have things like that and going on some interesting weapons here's one that's a known hawaiian weapon people today call that a knuckle duster build those based on those brass knuckle dusters but look what a weapon that was this one was made really beautifully of a type of wood called we call red cow wheeler today very very hard wood and look at the teeth they all go in one direction a shark's teeth go to the left on this side and to the right on this side so if you catch a shark probably about seven feet long maybe that would have teeth this size then you'd have the teeth going this way and this way and most of these that are known have the teeth going both directions so this one is not as good because you can only cut one way so i think it's more like a show-off weapon because to make this the chief had to have two sharks exactly the same size in order to get this many teeth going to the right than the steeply pointing outward pointer teeth we call and six more going that way the same way so that's just an unusual weapon again most of them would have the teeth going to the right or the left so it could cut either way in battle this one is another typical shark's tooth weapon this is made out of a wood called a kawaii or kawaii and it's again got some pretty good sized tiger shark teeth these are probably from a shark maybe about 10 feet long it has a wrist loop here like this and it's loose so you could get out of it fast and the lashing again would have been that that olenak cordage real real real strong cordy's made from an endemic plant in hawaii meaning it only grows in hawaii but there are various kinds of lashing this one is very complex it's got two strands through each hole and the strands go in between the teeth as well so that the strands go all the way around then a knot they go all the way around that are not then all the way around then all the way around four knots four passes so even if one got cut or broke it's not going to come apart and again it's a vicious cutting weapon so these woods the one here that i mentioned koi is a beautiful hardwood it was also used for tapa beaders to make the bark cloth it was used for paddles so it's straight grade and really strong it's not quite as hard as that cowiela would that i spoke of this is a type a push dagger the one that's known like this from hawaii was really bigger about 14 inches long but look at the form of this it's got a ball in here the cowella wood that this is made of could be made needle sharp and it'll hold that point in a really hard wood so it's used in the hand like this into the palm as a thrusting weapon and it's got a vicious barb so that if this was pushed into someone that's not going to come out and so this would be i think more like a assassin's weapon something that could be hidden under your topograph key hey it was a shoulder wrap or somewhat some other way hidden it's not a very big weapon like you would use in battle this one is interesting again i made that one out of kawaii wood it's got the typical handle and usually the weapons had the handle somewhere near the middle so that you could use both ends of the weapon also you could get out of the loop real fast if you have to in battle or just let it drop so that way it stays with you in fighting if you have to use both hands this one only has two teeth so that would suggest maybe a much lesser chief no commodore would have these sharks to either too valuable at item but a lesser chief might have just two teeth and so the way that this is lashed in here is to put cordage down into a hole that beats another hole and comes up the other way so it's a very difficult way of lashing very rare and the other thing about this weapon is it's still got the flat markings from using it ads which we'll talk about again and it's also in one of the earlier talks but the ansing will leave these flats and then later on if it's if if grinding stones as we're going to talk about abrading stones smooth this all down till it's really smooth it looks great but it's not as easy to hold especially in battle if your hands were all sweaty or bloody in battle these flutes that go down the sides or flats give a much much better grip so we'll talk later about this type of lashing that actually came to me in a dream like a vision like dream how to lash that and then we're going to go on with some of these other things and then i'll move over to the other side this one is really interesting this is also a known hawaiian weapon really crazy wild compared to other things in polynesia it's just like that it's got a hand guard it's got four long stingray barbs that are armoring the point and so i was lucky enough to see that and to measure it and then i made an exact replica it's 14 and a quarter inches long it has a really fine cordage here that ties these together and it's it's glued in place too the hawaiians had some glues in the old times they're pretty good glues but there's a little bit of wrap here and a little bit of wrap here and the very fine teeth that are on the stingray barb will hold the wraps in place and this type of cordage is from a plant material called mamaki in hawaii it's very very thin very very strong dark colored like this but also very flexible so it's easy to tie it and this is real real fine delicate coconut corning senate it's braided senate i didn't make that it probably came from some true expert maybe in the far reaches of sabawa again this one is made out of that wood called kawaii or koia it's a good strong real close grade wood and this copies probably a spanish weapon from the 1500s or 1600s they would have a cup-like hand protector right here that was made of open work iron and maybe for all we know the hawaiians had some kind of a gourd piece on here to copy that but it makes quite a weapon and it's very unique but it really is a known hawaiian weapon now what about this one what about that tooth that's that's a great white shark tooth and probably if it's inch and a half wide like that that shark's going to be about 13 feet long and weigh about 3 500 pounds a bad magnificent and ferocious beast so this one is pegged in place instead of tied in places that was a good way as long as you've got enough of a base to the tooth and you could flatten the tooth and make a slot to get it set in there you could drill through the tooth ahead of time and then drill through the outside and put pegs through there to hold it in place but look where this is this is a node piece from hawaii it's a copy of a node piece and here i used a wood really really hard kawela and this is the other kind of cow we look called dark cowela but the head the the lashing here is is back at the back the loop so this is more like to hang this up somewhere and so that suggests that it was a tool instead of a weapon because usually as i said the weapons will have this in the middle so you can get out of it and when you're gripping it here you can fight both ways you can use it like this and as your slashing tool but you're dependent on just one point if it broke in battle you'd be really stuck but you could sure do some serious cutting with this if it was just a tool so we don't know probably it was a tool and a weapon this is what's called a truncheon dagger that means it's a club on one side and a dagger on the other side is kind of a little diamond shape and cross section it's got a facsimile of an olena cordage loop here so it was used every which way like this back behind you or this way stabbing and that's called a trench of dagger in english this is a known hawaiian weapon and it's used from a swordfish bill the swordfish has an incredibly strong bill it has a certain amount of flexibility and a big one a surface could run it right through the planks of a boat without breaking its bill so the hawaiians favored that this one has got some real fine wrapping on here that i put on there just a fancy wrap with some gum on there the hawaiians had glue type materials to hold would hold it in place but give you a really good grip in battle so that's a smaller one a distinctly smaller one but that's the swordfish bill this is from a type of wood called a lahai usually it's small occasionally it grows big it's really really hard that was a bush that burned in a fire and i found that and decided not to cut it because a really powerful man more powerful than me could really wield this to tremendous effect in battle so it's really hard it's not going to break it's not going to dent it takes a beautiful polish that's allahe now here's something that's often seen today in replicas of hawaiian weaponry and that's the marlin mill great weapon another trench and dagger type weapon the trouble is there aren't any of these in the collections and captain cook and others did pick these up early on that i know of and i haven't heard of anybody except maybe one person that thought they had seen one of these in a collection so why would the hawaiians not make weapons out of marlin mills maybe because it was harder for them to catch the great big marlins that's possible because it makes a fabulous weapon but also it doesn't have the cutting edge that the swordfish bill has the cutting the cutting edge like a knife blade would make it extremely easy to stab with or to cut with and my thought is probably that they simply preferred the swordfish over the marlin this is another type of pahoa or dagger and vivix the type that was from kauai uh it's got some light streaks in here and the wood kowila means the lightning so the light streaks in the heartwood like that probably reminded hawaiians of lightning and that's where it got that name i've carved a little warrior's head on the end of this one just because that's what came to mind when i made that so all of these things i've made with the exception of two that long swordfish weapon i did not make and there's one other thing over here that i did not make um this one is a different one called uhi that's another one that's really really hard so the hardwoods olapua or pua and uhi and kawela either the dark wood or the red one were used to make the weaponry so this is really a true dagger it's not a trench of dagger you could strike with it on this end but it's really a dagger weapon it really has a needle-like point so if you were armed with that and this if you had this in your left hand to parry with and stab with and this is your right hand as a sword you'd be armed a lot like an old-time spaniard from the 1500s or so there sure would have been a slimmer one than this but interestingly enough none of the other polynesians had daggers just the hawaiians so this one is one more this is cowell wood too and this is more what you call a treacher dagger and it's approaching the longer ones that were called palau but this was kaweli it had a naturally burned piece here and that's i just made where probably the tree had gone through one fire that managed to put out a branch again i put a tooth in here which sometimes were in hawaiian weapons and bowls to insult someone and it has that diamond shaped point on this end so it could be used in the same way striking parrying all sorts of ways this way this way this way this way a really nasty weapon with good weight and the cowiela wood is really strong and really tough these are going to get to what are called devils a demo is some kind of a club so this is just some kind of hardwood a piece of driftwood i put a little loop on that one pretty good club fits that i had pretty good but pretty lightweight hard enough though for battle and so commoners you know constricted to fight in battles they would certainly have plant plenty of clubs like that now let's go over here this one just was just interesting to me now that's another piece of cow wheeler and it's not very pretty it's not straight but it looked like it kind of had an ear right here and a face here and so in the hard part the middle part of the wood there i carved a face because i've seen a weapon a weapon or two that had faces i restored one one time and this one has a curve and it fits perfectly in the hand of a right-handed person i didn't put a loop on that one but it's just a perfect weapon for a right-handed person so you get a heavy blower temple or liver kind of strike the stabbing weapon and just plain old clubbing like that this is another type of neva in which a wooden handle this is kauai once again some set it that coconut cordage and a four-sided head see that so the lashing is protected by the the extensions of the four-sided head and then the handle went up into a little hollow in the bottom of the stone head to give it more stability but that's called a deva and it's a two-piece demo part stone and part wood here's the head of a very big demo that i mean that's that took the longest of any stone thing i ever made stone on stone made only with that stone right there and the total time to make that head was 31 hours and i didn't even hollow the base it would take another hour or so to hollow the base this is called a peacoy and so this is also a had club easily enough right a good club but oftentimes this would have a long braided her say four four eight ply braided along cord so that the expert could throw this sort of like a bouncing yoyo and use it as a tripping club so it would spin around the feet of a combatant say they were running across the battlefield in front of an expert that had something like this they could flip this out they could spin around the legs of the command and down they'd be down and they'd be out real fast that way this one is real interesting because there's a record from the 1920s somebody found a cave at haleakala crater on maui and it talked about having a lot of hand axes in there there was a whole stockpile of weapons probably to try to fight against king kamehameha if ever the chance came again but it has a lot of wear around the handle and almost nowhere here on the edge and that means it was not a bread flute splitter it was not a tool it was a weapon so i think what they were talking about had axes or hand hatchets that's the only known example that i've ever seen or heard of but i think that's it right there did the hawaiians use bows like this no the bows were used for a sport for the elites to shoot at little rats just to sport and they did not use bows as weapons if they did use spears this beer here is called an e hay and that was more of a javelin so it was usually about six to eight feet long and if it had all these fancy barbs on the end it was called an ihe laumeki and it was designed to break off if it went into some combatant it was designed to break off it may be made of koa wood sometimes with a cowilla wood but these that were carved like this were probably made of koa wood all the time and the last thing here is the pololu and that's a pike that's this one here it usually had some kind of fancy handle at the bottom maybe just crude but sometimes fancy like that one made of cowula so it could be used as a pole vaulting thing if necessary to jump across a ditch or something in battle then it had various kinds of points but usually just a sort of a spear point type point like that and it was about 12 to 15 feet long ordinarily that one is only about 10 feet long because that's all the wood i had and that's all i could get into a vehicle to take it to a show and tell type of talk so that's the story on hawaiian weapons and we'll get into another video about how the map is weapons were made and another video about all the tools that were used to make these weapons mahalo

Channel: Traditional Hawaiian Culture

Views: 342,966

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Id: IANccLVglg0

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 28 2022